I'm Having a bit of a problem with ZoneAlarm Free Firewall and I was thinking someone here could offer some help.

The most recent versions of OpenOffice (3.4.1) and LibreOffice (4.0) have an about 5 second delay when copy-pasting text to an outside program (e.g. notepad). Within that brief, yet annoying period of time, pasting just does nothing. It doesn't matter if you right-click and select copy, press ctrl+c, or use "edit" menu. Copy-pasting within or from outside to OpenOffice works perfectly fine. Same goes for cut-pasting, ~5 second delay when pasting to an outside program.
I tried installing LibreOffice today to see if it would work, but the same phenomenon occurs in it as well.
The previous version of OpenOffice (3.3) worked fine, but because of issues displaying .pptx presentations correctly, downgrading is unfortunately not an option for me.

As I'm running several background programs (ZA Free Firewall, Avast! AV, Spybot Teatimer), I restarted in safemode to see if the issue still happened without any extra stuff in the background. It didn't, so I restarted normally and started to shut down background programs to se which one caused it.
Turns out ZoneAlarm is the cause, or at least with it shut down, the copy-paste delay does not occur.

At the moment, I have the OpenOffice components (or are they called modules...?) in ZA's application control settings, with internet access allowed (ZA pop-up asked) for the quickstarter application (soffice.exe, soffice.bin), with Calc, Impress, and Writer still at their initial settings (smartdefense at "auto" and everything else at "ask") as AZ hasn't asked about those yet.

So far, I have reinstalled OpenOffice as well as ZA (fresh installs for both), and the problem persists. Would someone have any idea what could be causing this and how to solve it?